NOVEL NEXT Chapter 10
After an unknown period of time, Nozzle nudged me awake with a foot. He had his cot under one arm and pointed to the door when I stirred.
“Time to patrol,” he grunted. “Come, let’s eat something first.”
I stood and shook a few small millipedes from my armor, then retracted it. Nozzle raised an eyebrow at my vibrant blue shirt, then reached out and rubbed its fabric between two fingers. “I like it. Is that you?” He pointed to one of the cartoon figures.
With a sigh, I nodded. “Not my choice, but yeah that’s supposed to be me.”
“Not wearing a shirt,” Nozzle grunted, then chuckled. “You strange, old human.”
“Yeah yeah, where’s breakfast?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. My camping trip was at least more peaceful than home, but I was getting sick of eating gamey bug meat.
Unfortunately, that was all there was available for breakfast. The gobbs had created another bonfire from the coals of the last one, and had stones resting at an angle against it, cooking slabs of the lobtis meat. I was handed a millipede armor segment with fresh, hot, greasy lobtis.
It, too, tasted like lobster. The gobbs seemed to be loving it, all of them either happily eating or carving at the corpses by the lake with equal gusto. While I ate my breakfast, I watched the tribe. Those who were not eating or working the lobtis bodies were improving their homes or crafting rudimentary tools. They had materials from the storage pods up above, and expertly mixed them with naturally occurring flora and BuyMort bug parts.
I even saw a fishing net being woven out of reeds from the lake shore. Without doubt they would be fishing for shrimp by the end of the day.
Nozzle got my attention with a light shove. He pointed to his spider, and I nodded, before finishing my chunk of lobtis meat and standing up. I wiped my greasy fingers on my armored pants, then rose into the air to follow the gobb ranger.
“I want to check the upper tunnels today,” he told me, before guiding his spider toward the elevator shaft. While they climbed up, I hovered alongside. The segments of Storage above his tribe’s tunnel were drier, but still covered with plant life. Small willow trees grew in the loam, buttressed by thick shrubs and heavy grasses.
Nozzle began marching his spider through the brush, peering carefully over its long legs at what lay below, and what it unearthed by disturbing the biome. I looked over the broad elevator shaft to the tunnel beyond.
“Hey, Nozzle,” I said, getting the gob rangers attention before he had moved too far away. “I’m going to patrol this way. Cover more ground if we split up.”
He nodded and then shot me a thumbs up. "Meet you back home!”
I chuckled, then turned and floated over the overgrown shaft. The other side was much the same, with tall grasses obscuring most of the area I hovered over. My anti-magic helmet and its fairy fire ability came in handy again as I used it to scout out fauna in the tunnel.
There were more millipedes, plenty of wild mushbugs, and a handful of tentacled cockroaches. Only the last were of any danger to the tribe if they wandered down a couple of levels, so I made a mental note to tell Nozzle about them when we rejoined. Further down the tunnel the grass and soil began to thin, until it truncated completely near the connecting elevator shaft.
The shaft was open from baffle to arrival platform, just like the others I had passed through. Only this shaft had clearly used to house a small city. Ruins of the structures were still plastered to the sides and encircling floor of the elevator shaft. Someone had opened the door and dropped the entire town down into the baffle below.
I flew down to inspect the baffle and found exactly what I was expecting. A cluster of steel, concrete, mudcrete, and plasti-steel material jammed into the baffle, wedging it open and non-functional. As I scanned the area, I saw skeletons and mummified corpses. The tentacle roaches scurried about, picking the corpses clean.
“BuyMort, I’d like to sell all the rubble and bodies in this shaft,” I whispered. Within a minute, a pod zipped in from above me and began flashing its rainbow light across the shaft. Sales began coming in.
Purchase: Construction Material; Steel. Condition, poor. Rarity, common. 3,876 morties dispensed.
Purchase: Bones; human. Condition, poor. Rarity, common. 87 morties dispensed.
Purchase: Construction Material; Concrete, miscellaneous. Condition, poor. Rarity, common. 16,893 morties dispensed.
I sighed at the low amounts, but the rubble was time worn and the bodies were all chewed on. All told, I made just over a hundred thousand morties by the time the shaft was empty. With a screeching metallic sound, the baffle began moving again. The planet exerted its pressure and got the ancient machinery moving once more.
Dim lights began to turn on in the shaft around me and the hum of flowing electricity filled the air. The baffle vibrated as it moved in and out with the surges of the planet’s thick atmosphere. Then it began screaming, the sound of tearing metal filling the shaft as something caught. The next push of the baffle shattered an internal part and the baffle screeched to a halt once more. Lights dimmed and went out, and the hum of electricity in the walls faded.
“Well, shit. Can’t fix that,” I murmured, and flew up out of the hole.
I continued my patrol and found more evidence of civilization. Some of it was nothing but tall huts, clearly constructed by tribal hobbs, but all long abandoned. Some of it was full sized abandoned cities, filling entire tunnels.
In one distant section, I found a completely webbed off tunnel and decided not to venture into it. The webbing stretched from floor to ceiling and plucked with echoed movement from deeper inside.
Eventually the day grew darker, and I started making my way back to the gobb village. I had mapped out several tunnels using my anti-magic helmet’s map and made notes of any potential dangers or good hunting grounds for the gobbs. When I returned, Nozzle was nowhere to be seen.
I ate more lobtis meat, and then went to sleep in the ranger’s hut with my armor on. The next day Nozzle did not return, and I became concerned. My own cognitive function had been returning day by day, and I was able to imagine all kinds of gruesome deaths for the gobb ranger in the many halls of Storage. I spent part of the day out looking for him but returned before nightfall out of concern for the tribe.
So many gobbs, so helpless to attack or capture. I felt like I was their only defense. All they had was grass clothing, rags, and basic weapons made from insect parts. I watched as they fished, some spearing catfish-grubs with long poles, tipped with lobtis or millipede legs. Others put their new nets to good use, scooping up tiny shrimps by the hundred, and eating them raw.
The two lobtis I had killed went surprisingly fast, and I realized again that the gobbs saved nothing. They feasted when feasting was an option, and fasted when it was not. The gobbs also strained water from the lake, using hollowed out fern stems filled with sand. Then they boiled it for drinking. It still looked brackish and murky to me, but they guzzled without care, once it was cleaned to their liking.
I ordered water for myself from BuyMort, paying a premium for clean, fresh water from Nu-Earth. The bottles featured cartoon hobbs raising bottles of their own to one another, wearing full military regalia.
On the third morning, Nozzle returned. His spider raced through the tunnel toward the village, and he whooped an alarm as he came. The gobbs all started running, grabbing whatever food or tools they could carry and scrambling for the elevator shaft.
Behind Nozzle was an army of slavers, with vehicles portaling in as I watched.